Seit 2016 kreieren Barkosina Hanusova und Jerome Tcherneyan mit ihrem gemeinsamen Projekt Years of Denial dunkle Elektro-Klänge und erforschen mit ihrer Musik die Grenzen neuer Klangkonzepte. Fasting culture ist Barkosinas Solo-Debüt, das sie Ende letzten Jahres veröffentlicht hat. Die 10 Tracks auf Fasting cuture sind ein ganz eigenes und unglaublich spannendes Klanguniversum, dem man sich nicht entziehen kann – eingehüllt in einen Sound, der dicht und überwältigend ist.
In ihrem Solo-Projekt verwebt die tschechische Künstlerin ein breites Spektrum unterschiedlicher Kunstformen zu einem außergewöhnlichen Gesamtkunstwerk. Fasting culture ist zusammen mit einem Buch, Fotografien (die wir euch im Interview zeigen), Essays und Gedichten von Barkosina erschienen.
In unserem Interview teilt die Künstlerin mit uns ihre Gedanken zum Thema Stille und spricht dabei über musikalische und visuelle Assoziationen und die Herangehensweise, Entstehung und Hintergründe ihrer aktuellen Veröffentlichung Fasting culture. Herzlichen Dank, Barkosina!
What are your thoughts about silence? What does silence mean to you?
Silence can mean so many different things, depending on the context. There is something that we fear but also love about silence, it’s intimidating and powerful. Silence can be cathartic and peaceful, but equally oppressive and unbearable. I associate silence with language, emotion, and human interaction. I can recall many everyday life situations where I would be better off saying nothing at all. If everyone is talking, nobody is listening, which makes me think of Paul Goodman and the different types of silence featured in a book called „Speaking and Language: defence of poetry (1973)“:
„Not speaking and speaking are both human ways of being in the world, and there are kinds and grades of each. There is the dumb silence of slumber or apathy; the sober silence that goes with a solemn animal face; the fertile silence of awareness, pasturing the soul, whence emerge new thoughts; the alive silence of alert perception, ready to say, “This… this…”; the musical silence that accompanies absorbed activity; the silence of listening to another speak, catching the drift and helping him be clear; the noisy silence of resentment and self-recrimination, loud and subvocal speech but sullen to say it; baffled silence; the silence of peaceful accord with other persons or communion with the cosmos.“
Furthermore, the use of silence in art has been used effectively, with a hint of radicalism and provocation. It’s a brilliant topic to work with, and there are so many interesting and exciting works that deal with such a concept, whether it’s music, performance art, theatre, film, dance and even literature. Artists experiment with pause, stillness, time, space, emptiness, but true silence is non-existent, as John Cage’s famous quote suggests: „There is no such thing as silence. Something is always happening that makes a sound.“
How would you describe the visual aspect of silence?
Staring at the ocean, or fire, being intimate with one another, the look of the sky, the road and the desert, poetics of reverie, and the beauty of the mountain, being alone & being far apart, to bear the burden of a heavy heart.
The visualization of silence is portrayed exquisitely in all of Andrei Tarkovski‘s films, also in Marcel Marceau’s pantomime, even in performance artworks such as Tehching Hsieh’s „Time Clock Piece“ and Marina Abramovic’s „The Artist is Present.“, John Cage’s “4’33″” piece and Yoko Ono & John Lennon’s „2 minutes silence“. We find it also in painting, for example Vincent van Gogh’s „Starry Night“ while in the mental asylum, also in literature such as Sylvia Plath’s death, when turning the gas on and placing her head inside the oven. Even in humanitarian protest, Gandhi’s hunger strike. And so on and on. Being able to visualize silence, we have to experience it first, and then it becomes vivid.
You moved from London to a rural area close to Marseille. What impact do your surroundings have on your art?
Every city has its unique vibration that causes a stream of inspiration to any artistic mind. One can be in a noisy, crowded place while remaining isolated and anonymous, the paradise for artists. There is so much to discover, the concrete poetry, peculiar lives of others, city anxiety. Strangers, let me love the night, aren’t we all lost & found?
However, that is the romantic part, and then there is the realistic one.
Once upon a time, I found myself all over the place in the city, having four different jobs to survive, serving food at the restaurant, being an activity coordinator for the elderly with dementia, working in the office, and performing at the weekends. It was going down the drain bit by bit until the ultimate physical and emotional exhaustion, which then resolved in fatigue and a mountain of distraction.
I moved to the rural area to find the artist within me I forgot about and claimed to be. It took a lot of work, and it felt like a horrible urban hangover at first, but I was able to stop, pause and breathe, and this had a tremendous impact on my work. The story of a flying bird might not be as interesting as the one about a girl living in the city, but as an artist who wants to make progress and take her work seriously, this beautiful yet empty surrounding opened up a new door for me.
Suddenly, I had so much time, less distraction, more solitary experience, and I was free to create as much as I wanted to. The concept of time struck me, and the new environment gradually helped me understand – art is also about learning how to wait – that one must focus on the process of creating, not on the outcome, and ideas take time. The distance and silence helped me to embrace my artistic practice, with struggles, of course, and ups and downs, thoughts louder than sirens, absence of social life, staring at the wall for hours, but without even realizing I was already in the process of creating new work.
We live in the age of information overload, and we have forgotten about art, people are no longer interested because they are only interested in themselves. As Andy Warhol predicted: „In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.“ The lens of the camera is a mirror, and if you look in the mirror every day, you are simply not looking anywhere else. We must engage with the arts more and make time for it.
Daniel Levitin describes it perfectly:
„As a society, it seems we take less time for art. In doing so we may be missing out on something that is deeply valuable and important from a neurobiological standpoint. Artists recontextualize reality and offer visions that were previously invisible. Creativity engages the brain’s daydreaming mode directly and stimulates the free flow and association of ideas, forging links between concepts and neural nodes that might not otherwise be made. In this way, engagement in art as either a creator or consumer helps us by hitting the reset button in our brains. Time stops. We contemplate. We reimagine our relationship to the world.“
How important is nature to you? What role does nature play in your life and in your art?
I grew up in an industrial city called Ostrava close to Polish borders. Later I lived in London, and nature would always be more of a holiday idea. But since moving to the countryside and living in different places, for example farms, mountains, rivers, villages, I connected with animals a lot. It’s beautiful to wake up, say hi to horses, then go out checking on my chickens Dora and Uma, picking up eggs for breakfast, walk around chatting to the sheep, even witnessing a birth of a lamb, playing with dogs, adopting a kitten. I sometimes felt like an addict in rehab. Nowhere to go, nobody to see. But spending a lot of time walking alone, thinking, and digesting the past ten years of my life has been very beneficial.
The work I do addresses the entertaining and tragic elements of the human experience, referring to the intimacy and complexity of feelings as a response to life. The theme of endurance plays a big part in my artistic practice, exercised through durational performances and personal research, such as physical exhaustion, fasting practice, and isolation. As it seems, I think nature helped me and my work to grow.
Your music is interconnected to other art forms such as theatre, poetry, writing, film, and performance. Do you have a favourite artistic medium to compose/represent/visualize silence?
I don’t think about achieving the subject of silence when working. Silence comes and goes in any artistic medium, and somehow the use of silence is essential in all art forms. Maybe we don’t notice it much, but it is there. Also, the preparation of the work, which is the internal silence of an artist, is involved in the process.
What are your first musical memories?
I wouldn’t know which was the very first memory, but I do remember one that moved me, because of the music itself, and the atmosphere. It was when my mum used to play Nick Cave on CDs. She used to have the entire collection. And it was probably the only pleasant moment and memory in that household.
What is the sound of silence? What does silence sound like?
I know only one record that can answer this question.
„Sounds of silence: The most intriguing silences in recording history!“
This vinyl is a brilliant compilation released on the Italian label Alga Marghen, specializing in experimental historical obscurities and twentieth-century composition. In this anthology, you can hear political, critical, abstract, poetic, cynical, and absurd silences, rare works by Andy Warhol, John Lennon, Afrika Bambaataa, Whitehouse, Crass, Yves Klein, Orbital, and so on.
What piece of music feels like silence turned into sound to you?
„Silence is sexy“ by Einstürzende Neubauten :)
Straight forward, right? Well, Blixa Bargeld smokes a cigarette while performing this work live, and you hear intervals when he inhales and exhales the smoke into a microphone, and there is no other sound at this very moment. I think it’s just brilliant.
Your solo debut „Fasting culture“ is about stillness in art and culture/the absence of culture. How did the writing happen? How did the idea and concept get seeded and what was the process like to turn these thoughts into essays, poetry, photography, and music?
Fasting culture is this charming idea about and for artists enduring the pandemic and beyond. Maybe they sit in their tiny apartments, midnight hostels, or wandering around empty streets with empty pockets trying to figure it all out – the purpose of their existence. Because without culture, the artist can’t persist.
During the pandemic arts & culture vanished. It was forgotten mercilessly, characterized as an unimportant aspect of society and encouraged to bury itself under the soil of ‚chosen economy.’ The cultural landscape was first to shut down and last to be re-opened, without any support. Quick as a flash, culture and living art was dead. For this reason, I felt the need and urgency to experience physical emptiness, a state of deprivation to articulate this concept – that the absence of culture is parallel to the absence of nutrition.
As it’s well known, the artist earns a living from live performances, not publishing materials or releases. We create art for the sake of it, for humanitarian purposes, common sense, unity, love, aspiration, for others, but somehow, we always struggle to survive even though we all know the importance of arts & culture in our society.
I don’t see art to be something superior or rich, quite the opposite. The artist is a human who understands empathy and has the creative ability to be open, to give and to educate, to create a safe space for all different cultures to be equal, united, respected and loved. No, don’t get me wrong, the artist is not a hero. Art is everything possible. It is a mirror, a hammer, madness, sanity, death, birth, failure, luck, love, and hate. An artist is all in one, therefore understands the meaning of empathy. We often undermine the concept of empathy and the importance of arts & culture. It’s all about the cures and cracks of our society. What is the funniest thing about it all? You don’t need the talent to be an artist, you only need a good heart.
I have been practicing fasting for about five or six years. When fasting, I choose to do long fasts, up to seven days, because one must penetrate the deeper tissue of the process. You have to prolong and endure to be able to feel the difference. I wanted to articulate what I call hunger for cultural engagement during the pandemic. I chose to fast for seven days, in every lockdown, during the period of isolation, and create at the same time, first making photographic images followed by writing and making music.
The fasting process allowed me to be in a state of emptiness, silence, introversion, focus, and I wanted to see what kind of work would come out of it. My desire during this process was to be as spontaneous and honest as possible. For this reason, Fasting culture is an experiment, a conceptual work.
What holds the future for Barkosina? What are you most looking forward to?
Oh dear, I began to write this interview before the war in the Ukraine, where I performed about two weeks ago, and here I am back from Russia, where I also performed just a few days ago, finishing writing about silence in the midst of noise and chaos. As everyone I can think of, we were kicking in again after a long pause, feeling motivated, feeling that what we do makes sense, and here we are bleeding, fighting political hostility. The most influential works of art I know come from pain, because pain has an awakening effect on people. The material to create sometimes comes from the darkest places we know, and open wounds teach us. I had many plans for the future, but I can’t see any right now. We shall finally live in the present, carry the burden of our own species, and make some interesting art out of it. As Laurie Anderson says: “Nothing stays the same for more than a few seconds.”
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